Deals with the Devil? Conflict Amnesties, Civil War, and Sustainable Peace

Abstract

Do legal amnesties for combatants help end civil wars? International policy experts often take it for granted that amnesties promote negotiated settlements with rebels. However, a large number of amnesties are followed by continued fighting or a return to the battlefield. What, then, are the factors that make amnesties effective or ineffective? In this article I use a disaggregated data set of all amnesties enacted in the context of internal war since 1946 to evaluate a bargaining theory of amnesties and peace. Testing hypotheses about conflict patterns using models that account for selection, I find that (1) only amnesties passed following conflict termination help resolve civil wars, (2) amnesties are more effective when they are embedded in peace agreements, and (3) amnesties that grant immunity for serious rights violations have no observable pacifying effects. These policy-relevant findings represent a new breakthrough in an ossified “peace versus justice” debate pitting security specialists against global human rights advocates.

The Reach of Radio: Ending Civil Conflict through Rebel Demobilization

“…Despite the importance of these policies in recent history, rigorous quantitative evaluations are scarce. A total of 297 conflict amnesties were granted between 1946 and 2010 (Dancy 2018). From 1989 to 2010, 40 DDR programs were implemented, of which 14 were instituted during ongoing conflicts (Banholzer 2014).…”

Judicial Reform – A Neglected Dimension of SSR in El Salvador

“…8. Quantitative research analysed the role of amnesties for war termination and war recurrence (Dancy 2017;Dancy and Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2017;Melander 2009) with a focus on the question if and under what conditions armed actors are willing to disarm. Results are rather inconclusive.…”

Amnesties and Inclusive Political Settlements

“…Reiter, 2014). Other studies base their analysis solely on peace agreement amnesty commitments regardless of whether these commitments were honoured (Melander, 2009), and others include amnesty offers in their sample regardless of whether the offer was ever implemented (Dancy, 2018). One study fails to offer any definition (Lie, Binningsbø and Gates, 2007).…”

“…As much of the existing academic and policy literature on amnesty asks when amnesties are illegal, the low prevalence of amnesties for international crimes points to the value in now identifying points of convergence on the forms of amnesties that are legally permissible and likely to have a positive impact on transitions from conflict. As Section 2 below explores, this issue is particularly timely given that recent research indicates that amnesties may be more successful in resolving armed conflict, where they are limited to exclude international crimes and serious human rights violations (Dancy, 2018).…”